Slutspel i Irak? ISIS och allierade erövrar Mosul

Where does the group's money come from?
In the beginning, al Baghdadi focused on secrecy -- with loosely connected cells making it more difficult to hunt down the leadership -- and on money.
Extortion, such as demanding money from truck drivers and threatening to blow up businesses, was one revenue stream; robbing banks and gold shops was another.

It seemed the group had become little more than gangsters, but the income would help finance a growing stream of suicide attacks and assassinations that would poison the political atmosphere.
It would also aid the recruitment of Sunni tribal fighters and finance spectacular prison raids that liberated hundreds of fighters, as well as attacks on police patrols and the assassination of officials.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM: Israel told the United States Thursday that Kurdish independence in northern Iraq was a “foregone conclusion,” and Israeli experts predicted the Jewish state would be quick to recognize a Kurdish state, should it emerge.
Israel has kept discreet military, intelligence and business ties with the Kurds since the 1960s, seeing in the minority ethnic group a buffer against shared Arab adversaries.

Kerry discussed the Iraqi crisis with Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman in Paris Thursday.
“ Iraq is breaking up before our eyes and it would appear that the creation of an independent Kurdish state is a foregone conclusion,” Lieberman’s spokesman quoted him as telling Kerry.

Israeli intelligence veterans say that cooperation took the form of military training for Kurds in northern Iraq, in return for their help in smuggling out Jews as well as in spying on Saddam Hussein’s regime in Baghdad and, more recently, on Iran.
Eliezer Tsafrir, a former Mossad station chief in Kurdish northern Iraq who is now retired from Israeli government service, said the secrecy around the ties had been maintained at the request of the Kurds.
“We’d love it to be out in the open, to have an embassy there, to have normal relations. But we keep it clandestine because that’s what they want,” he told Reuters.